Issue 19, February 2008

Lisson Gallery, London
30 November - 19 January

Review by Laura Allsop

Santiago Sierra has been described as many things: an activist, a polemicist, a Marxist, a hypocrite. In all cases, the descriptions (and personal judgements) refer to what he is perceived to say as an artist and are crucially predicated on his works' didacticism. His show at Lisson Gallery in London, titled New Works, includes 21 Anthropometric Modules Made from Human Faeces by the People of Sulabh International, India (2005–6), a series of slabs fashioned out of a mix of the poo and an agglutinative plastic called Fevicol. This is the focus of the exhibition, taking up three rooms of gallery space, while various installations (largely refrains of previous works but including one new soundwork) are housed at the gallery's second space on Bell Street.

The slabs, hollowed out to resemble beds or containers, rest on their sides on wooden planks covered with blankets. We are told in the caption that the excrement was collected by the low-caste poor (lumpen proletarians to your Marxist) in India, who work as manual scavengers. We are also told that these workers were not paid for their work, while – it is presumed – the slabs themselves will be sold to collectors of a different stripe for a lot of money.

Sierra often riles his critics with these sorts of confrontations. But while it is easy to get excited (and outraged) by the sorts of issues his works and events put forward, the Modules in this case have little to say; they make a quiet series of minimal forms, and though the odd vestige of labour (a discarded pair of plastic gloves) may be glimpsed, the space feels eerily abandoned.

You could extrapolate a confusing array of situations and tenses from the work: between an ended action (the work that fed the artwork) and an ongoing action (the exploitation of workers), which the slabs are metonyms for; or the present continuous in relation to the slabs as objects, and what they are perceived to be saying about the actions they stand for. And yet despite all this conceptual noise, the slabs remain, like headstones, mute. This is not the case in the other gallery, which is all noise: 1549 State Crimes (2007), a 72-hour sound recording of a public reading of the names of 1,549 people who succumbed to political violence in Mexico since the late 1960s, jars with the deafening hum of Concert for a Diesel Electric Plant (2007), a video of a concert of urban sounds: a generator's drone, people's screams. Even the pieces that are technically silent, such as the photographic series Economical Study of the Skin of Caracans (2006), feel noisily polemical. Indeed, this piece and the slide projection Four Black Vehicles with the Engine Running Inside an Art Gallery (2007) are constructed like sentences, their parts arranged sequentially and ending in an eventual payoff.

In the end, it's the Modules that make the most impact: instead of elaborating on a situation to make a statement, Sierra turns the situation into the work – and all the rest is silence.